Death in the Black Wood by Oliver Davies (epub read online books .txt) 📕

“We’re out of luck at my end Shay. He’s just reached the forty miles an hour stretch and speeded up. I’ll go higher and keep after him but you might want to get him on the satellite view if you don’t want to lose him.” If nothing else, we were about to find out how well the system worked when we were trying to track a specific target together.

While Shay set his drone to hover and switched his attention to the satellite, I kept following the car as my own drone climbed higher again. By the time our driver passed the Premier Inn and turned onto the A82, heading east, I was already far behind him. I told Shay of the turn and followed the car towards the canal, seeking a clear view of the roundabout ahead.

“Okay, he’s heading up Glenurquhart Road.” He could just have easily gone south there instead.

This might well be nothing, but Shay was right, it did seem odd. The man had apparently parked up at the hotel, walked a mile, climbed into a different car and driven off again. It was twenty to four in the morning and I couldn’t think of a rational explanation for those movements. This was the most suspicious activity we’d seen all night.

“Okay, I’ve got the satellite view over there now. There are five different cars moving around past that roundabout, all close enough to be ours.” Shay told me as he studied the big screen. “Two on the main road and three on side streets… and there’s no guarantee that his car is actually one of them. It’s possible that he could even have parked up again for all we know. All I can do now is keep them in view and check for GPS signals. If I zoom in on one of them, I risk losing the others.” Which meant that we’d probably lost him. Well, at least we had the licence plate, and the model.

At my cousin’s suggestion, I released drone four back to its pre-programmed flight pattern and took control of the hovering drone five while he was occupied with watching the traffic. Moving slowly and using Shay’s panning technique to get good views to both sides as I progressed, I was soon past the church and moving west on Kinmylies Way, approaching the near end of the footpath that I’d first spotted our man on. The sight that arrested my attention as I reached it was just to the right of the path. Maybe that metal pole had once held a sign, or a litter bin, but there was only one thing attached to it now.

Chris Arnold’s severed head.

Fifteen

After I’d called McKinnon, who had insisted I wake him if any significant developments broke during the night, I found that Shay had located our car by flying a freshly recharged drone down from the nearby cathedral. The five moving vehicles he’d spotted with the satellite had all turned out to have GPS systems running and he’d thought it highly unlikely that any of them were being driven by the killer. Those were all still showing up as moving dots, crawling around a map he’d pulled up on his laptop screen.

He’d found the abandoned car parked up near the bottom end of Ballifeary Road, a very handy spot if our man had intended to cut through the cemetery on foot. The trees came all the way down to the fence near there. A second call from me ensured that McKinnon would start pulling in patrol cars from the outlying areas to circle the cemetery. The crime scene itself would soon be safely cordoned off, and he’d already known to send someone to the Premier Inn. We didn’t want anyone touching either of those abandoned cars before our SOCO teams could get to them and their top priority would be the scene up in Kinmylies.

“We’ll have a few cars in position around the cemetery soon, and McKinnon will send a search team in to sweep the hill once it gets light. Have you seen any sign of him moving around out there?” I asked Shay after making the second call.

“None yet and he could have gone to ground anywhere around there if he didn’t hop the fence into the cemetery. We lost that car for a good seven minutes.”

Either option seemed equally plausible. He could be in any of the houses or garages nearby and the tree cover on Tomnahurich was dense. The ‘Hill of the Yews,’ also frequently referred to as the ‘Fairy Hill,’ was a well-known landmark feature. Formed by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age, the hill stood in impressive solitude looking down on the surrounding plain. The views from the summit where the oldest graves were found was well worth the walk up there and it was a popular spot with locals and tourists alike. The heavily wooded hillsides were a good half a kilometre long, from north to south, with the flat, newer area of the cemetery circling the hill on all sides.

If our man had gone through there, he could come out again anywhere around the extensive perimeter. Shay’s satellite couldn’t pick up something as small as a person moving around unless he zoomed in on a specific area. The drones gave us a much better chance of spotting our man, if he was out there on foot.

Tomnahurich had plenty of old folk tales surrounding it. One claimed that Thomas the Rhymer was either buried beneath or still dwelt within the hill. Another old story told of two travelling fiddlers who’d entered there one night to perform for its faerie inhabitants, only to crumble to dust after emerging again because two hundred years had passed in the world outside during their night inside the hill. Ireland didn’t hold the monopoly on tales like that.

Well, we certainly weren’t hunting for mythical elvish creatures tonight.

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